A Mother’s Day Stick Shift: What Mom’s Cars Say About Her

Many members of the tribe of the auto-obsessed can trace their compulsion back to parental indoctrination—a sort of vehicular Munchausen-by-proxy, in which the implanted toxin is a father’s fascination with a rusty Austin-Healy 3000 or a mother’s preening affection for all things motorized and Italian. Not so for me—or not exactly. Though my father took me to the Detroit Auto Show every year and patiently indulged my fetish for things be-wheeled, tacky, and baroque, his own vehicles were (and remain) unerringly quotidian. My mother, on the other hand, while never making an objectively groovy automotive choice, more than made up for it by selecting an array only matched in its eclecticism by the course of her actual life. In celebration of Mother’s Day, I offer up this annotated slideshow of my mother’s amazing existence, via her cars.

Chevrolet Vega: In 1972, Mom was 25, had three children under the age of five, lived in Detroit with my dad, and made frequent trips to her hometown of Chicago. So when everyone else was driving blatty muscle cars and vinyl-roofed land yachts, why wouldn’t she buy a diminutive domestic hatchback with a reputation for rust, unreliability, and lock-up braking skids? She’d pile blankets in the back, and we’d all lie down gesturing up at menacing semi drivers through the sloping rear windshield, trying to get them to honk their air horns. Photos courtesy of Wikipedia.

Malibu Classic Wagon: A few years after the fourth Berk child was born, Mom bought her first and only station wagon. But though it seated five in the two rows of rear benches, my baby brother always sat on the padded armrest up front, a position that lacked both seatbelt and seatback, and was known, eponymously, as “the Derek Seat.” He has many memories of head-butting the rearview mirror and windshield during panic stops.

Buick Century: My parents filed for divorce in 1982 (the day after my Bar Mitzvah, coincidentally), and Mom began working long hours selling insurance to support all of us. As an elegant, single saleswoman, she needed to represent when making house calls, and for her that meant a two-tone, black-and-silver Buick with wire wheel covers and a Pagliacci-buttoned, bunched-velour interior. The day after I received my driver’s license, I drove this car to the mall. While I was inside clicking male-nudie pens at Spencer’s gifts, someone sideswiped it.

Mercury Grand Marquis: Mom’s new boyfriend was rich and bald and drove a Lincoln, opening her mind to the idea of Jews owning Fords (a taboo, given Henry Ford’s anti-Semitism). I tried to convince her of the merits of a swoopy Thunderbird Turbo Coupe for her baptismal plunge into the blue-oval brand pool. Instead, she chose this rectangular behemoth, because she needed a trunk large enough to stow the 3,000 carpet samples she used in her new job peddling commercial flooring. Perilously hungover, I drove the car on Saturday mornings during one college summer for my job as a rural mail carrier.

Toyota Supra: Mom did not like sitting low, driving fast, or having her hair blow in the wind, so why did she pick a high-powered, targa-roofed Japanese GT? Perhaps it was an actualization of her white-hot excitement at her second marriage to a (bald, wealthy, Lincoln-driving) automotive industrialist, or an external manifestation of her inner fastness and furiousness. One sure hint of things to come: Annie Lennox and Tracy Chapman were on permanent shuffle in the six-CD player.

Chrysler LHS: Mom’s second husband’s elderly sister lived three doors down from their big new house in the suburbs. The sister-in-law was Chrysler-loyal and owned one of these boats, and somehow convinced Mom of its merits. They would drive them the 200 yards between their houses, and spend the day drinking and complaining together.

Geo Tracker: Not quite as weird a transition as it seems: Mom convinced her second husband to buy her a house to renovate in Key West, and she needed a local runabout that fit in with the ostentation-less nature of the island—one that could take her from the Home Depot to the liquor store to the Chinese take-out place at speeds safely delimited by the vehicle’s wheezy capabilities. This was the car in which I learned to drive “Key West Style”: windows open, a/c blasting, drink in hand.

Lexus GS300: Mom’s second hubby loved Lexuses—for himself—but wouldn’t get her one. So when they finally divorced, she splurged with her settlement and bought her own. Yet neither the upscale purchase nor the divorce was the biggest transition this vehicle represented. All that Sirius Coffee House music and a life in the Keys came to its logical fruition, and Mom started going with girls, making her sort of a Lipstick Lexbian.

Nissan Murano: When things went on an express train to crazy town with her first lady lover, Mom sold the Key West house and returned to the loving embrace of her friends in Detroit, buying and renovating a condo, opening a gift store in a suburban office park, and undergoing extensive medical treatment for a long-term health issue. I don’t know how this hideous, tortoise-shaped crossover fits in with all that. Self-flagellation?

Chrysler Crossifre/Jeep Liberty: As if she were working from a mental checklist of every possible automotive body type, Mom’s triumphant return to Key West cued the simultaneous leasing of a pair of vehicles—a convertible and an S.U.V.—ideal for someone who disliked top-down motoring and the outdoors. She ended up sharing the roadster with her second girlfriend, a classic preppy butch with a fondness for blazers, Bermuda shorts, and cheap vodka. Fortunately, the leases outlasted the relationship.

Scion xB: We all dream of that ideal goal car we’ll purchase once we’re old and free enough. But when my mom hit retirement age, she bought this downscale fridge box—the linchpin in the fantasy garage of a 23-year-old kid in East L.A.—in a shade I like to call “dried toothpaste.” She also got married again, to a very lovely lady. She and her wife, a Broadway performer, now reside in New York but make frequent extended road trips in the Scion. “Honey, we both love to drive,” she often says.